How to Use External Business Units

Overview

External Business Units can be added to a project that allow objects from another project in the repository to be added to the current project. This can be very useful when it is desirable to maintain separate projects from a development perspective but the need exists to ultimately combine everything into a single project. A common example would be to have separate databases that have different structures (such as a new NAV 2015 database and a legacy NAV 2009 database), maintain a separate staging database for each, but then consolidate all of the NAV 2009 data into the NAV 2015 project.

Process

In order to add an External Business Unit to a project there must first be at least two project in the project repository database. The user can then right click on the
Business Units
node and select
Add External Business Unit
.

The user will then select the desired project to add from the
Project
dropdown list as well as the version to use from the
Version
dropdown list ("Latest" is the typical selection for the version). The user will then select which Business Unit to use from the project under the
Business Unit
dropdown list. Once these have been selected the user will click
Ok.

Note: The Business Unit names must be different in the two projects otherwise an error will appear stating that that the Business Unit name already exists.

The next window will ask the user how to synchronize the objects.
By ID
is typically the best selection.

The Business Unit from the other project is now added to the current project beneath the existing data sources.

The user can then drag all of the desired fields from the External Business Unit and drop them on the desired tables in the data warehouse to consolidate information between the two systems. The screenshot below illustrates the Company table and the Customer table being consolidated.

The user can then deploy and execute the modified tables in the data warehouse to commit the changes and consolidate the data.